Jay,
You make some very interesting points about the existence of intrinsic
properties of objects. Physical theory takes as a premise that there is a
real world and that the real world has properties that are intrinsic - this,
I think, is the origin of 'observer independence' that is partially
responsible for the demand to verify experimental evidence. Unfortunately,
observer independence is often confused with objectivity.
We must be careful to distinguish between the intrinsic properties of the
world, whatever they are, and our description of them through theories,
concepts, hypotheses, laws, principles. What Latour calls 'black boxes' is
partially what I call extensions of our senses - those instruments that help
us know the world. It is not that the real world 'really has intrinsic
properties' or that we can ultimately know them, but their existence is the
underlying assumption upon which the physical science research programme (to
borrow from Lakatos) is based.
The formulation that, whatever the properties of the real world really are,
our knowledge of the world arises through the creation of mind, means that
properties of objects, or the real world, are also relational in physical
theory. Bohr's atom, the Heisenberg formulation.... the many worlds
interpretation exemplify the relational interaction between subject and
artifact in our recent history.
Bill B
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Date: 7/11/97 5:50 PM
To: Bill Barowy
From: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
Paul's response to my worries about affordances being taken as
intrinsic properties of people, or objects, seems to find the
relationality of the notion of affordance still compatible with
a notion that objects have intrinsic properties, that the 'object'
can be regarded as still meaningful when analytically separated
from its milieu.
This is a basic disagreement I guess. I have come over the years
to be profoundly mistrustful of the notion of intrinsic properties,
and this has also extended more recently to an unwillingness to
rely more than the language nearly forces us to on a notion of
isolable objects. My view is rather than relations do not exist
between pre-existing 'objects', but rather than the notion of
'object' (or person, I'm afraid) is itself a particular, and sometimes
very misleading, abstraction by our culture, from what is often
better seen as systems of interdependent happenings, or dynamical
'flows', which constitute the possibility of artificially isolating
'participants' in these processes, of the sort we call 'objects'.
In a purely logical sense, the justification for the notion of
intrinsic property, is that it remains invariant across all the
interactions or processes in which an 'object' participates. This
is however often not a particularly good approximation. It certainly
does not seem very good as applied to what one might want to
call psychological properties of human individuals in social
interaction. It is even today on rather shaky ground in respect
to basic properties of objects like electrons, though certainly
it has often been a more useful approach there.